Kristin

Turn off your computer. Put down your phone.
Pick up a feather, a leaf, a bone.
Marvel at a flower. Plant a seed. Take a walk.
Remember who you are.

Be generous with your love.
Protect someone. Take a stand.
Make art. Dance with strangers.
Find your courage.

Resist distraction. Be present.
Articulate your dreams.
Act on behalf of the next seven generations.
Sing to the stars.

Invest in what makes you come alive.
Open to what is possible. Decolonize your heart.
Thank your ancestors. Bless the land.
Remember who we are.

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Imagine.

The eradication of poverty. Vibrant intact ecosystems. Sovereignty for Indigenous peoples, everywhere. Salmon spawning in restored creeks. Schools safe from shootings. Streets free from police brutality. Clean energy. Shelter for the homeless. Dissolution of the toxic trio of patriarchy, white supremacy and rampant capitalism. Borders marked by thresholds not walls.

Whole Communities.

Working for this future calls me to be as much mystic as warrior. I trust that the long arc of the moral universe indeed bends towards justice. I rise each day to trouble oppressive systems, to be reverent with nature, to show up with love and power.

I do this work with my colleagues at CWC and in solidarity with communities everywhere actively healing our relationships to each other and the land. We have been shaping the Whole Communities Fellowship with our interdependence at the center – a sacred offering, anchored in a vision of reality that we must collectively imagine into being.

“Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

What is ours to do? What is yours to do?

These times ask us to weave our movements more closely together in fierce and tender solidarity. The Whole Communities Fellowship will convene and support a cohort of 24 community leaders whose work lives at the intersections of Justice and Environment, Land and People.

The fellowship is designed to help strengthen inner and interpersonal leadership capacity, laying a foundation for engaging at cultural and systemic levels. We will work within a cycle of transformation between the self, community, nature and systems. We will follow the arc of the seasons, tuning into the inherent wisdom and energy of the natural world. We will be strategic and emergent, with clear goals and guidance balanced with the experience, insights and questions of the cohort. The Fellowship begins in March and ends in February 2020 including two in-person retreats, individual coaching, independent study and monthly virtual practice spaces.

As we launch the 2019 Whole Communities Fellowship, I hold this as a collectively activated prayer.

May the brilliance of hearts in dialogue with each other embolden us.
May we counter the chaos facing our planet with irresistible creativity.
May we be of service with greater clarity and purpose.
May the ways we build together help heal the fractures in our world.

What is your offering? What is yours to do?

Discover what a whole community means to you and commit to doing something each month that helps bring it more fully into being. Apply yourself or nominate the most inspiring person you know. Spread the word. Whether or not you are a participant in this year’s fellowship program, you are an essential part of our whole community. Stay tuned as we learn and grow together.

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CWC Senior Fellow Kristin Rothballer is a social change leader with a focus on the intersection of personal, social and ecological healing and transformation. Kristin is currently pursuing a Masters in Social Transformation at Pacific School of Religion, part of the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, CA.

Photo by Natasha Rigg

When I take the time to really slow down and tune into my breath, the silence, nature, I begin to experience myself as part of the larger whole of life. I feel power, depth, connection. I feel alive. I sense what the poet Joy Harjo described “That you can’t see, can’t hear; Can’t know except in moments steadily growing, and in languages that aren’t always sound but other circles of motion.” When I am in the presence of redwood, hawk, mountain or river, the politics of division loosen their grip on me. I lean in to the collaborative nature of life, the universe breathing through me, my inherent capacity to connect and transform.

This year has challenged me in just about every way possible. I’ve been shaken to my core, deeply uncertain at times how to show up for myself, much less my family, my work, the world. I’ve made choices that don’t support my personal wellbeing, and have been forced to reckon with the consequences. I’ve disappointed people and I’ve doubted myself in the process. As a result, I’m actively choosing to let go of parts of my life that don’t sustain me. I hope to start the next year in a healthier place, with greater capacity to face the challenges to come, and perhaps most importantly, to show up for my family in a time of need.

When I have the opportunity, I take my questions and my pain to the land and into ceremony. I seek the wisdom of what is greater than me, my ego and whatever story I find myself stuck in. I have generally found ease, comfort and alignment in wild places, so returning to these places is a natural field of practice for me. Feeling into my own experience of pain, story and shadow inevitably opens and reopens me to the grief and complexity that exists in the world. I can be present to what is moving in me – and be vulnerable, release, heal. I am able to move through the current of discomfort, informed, transformed, and into new patterns of awareness.

This is aspirational practice, to be clear. I’m laying out what it looks like at its best, when I carve out the time and space, and turn inward for guidance. There are reasons why “practice” is practice. And the practice of awareness, bringing my full presence to connecting to land and place grounds me, heals me, and strengthens my resolve to show up every day to help bend the arc towards justice.

The majority of the current news in this country shows a nation out of alignment, an ever-increasing consolidation of wealth and power, and the exploitation of nature for short-term corporate gains – at the expense of the people and at the mercy of all species whose life depends on healthy ecosystems. The halls of justice have become theaters of injustice, perpetuating inequality on a scale that threatens the future of life on Earth.

But the heart of our movements for equity, liberation, resiliency is increasingly finding its polyrhythmic alliance. I feel honored to contribute towards this healing through my work with Center for Whole Communities.

Our theory of change states “there is an enduring wholeness that exists alongside the challenges we face, revealing pathways across these divides.” This is a deep reminder at a time when the challenges can feel paralyzing. The pathways include compassion, connection, listening, gratitude, humility, fierceness. Cultivating our capacity to show up and be present forms a foundation that helps us imagine and design a future that harmonizes the human experience on this magnificently beautiful planet. We are not separate, and the more fully we allow this truth back into our bodies, the better equipped we will be to be the kind of warriors for justice that our ancestors and future generations are praying for.

The natural world models so much of what we need to dig ourselves out of this increasingly hostile, divisive, unsafe world. No matter who we are or what we believe, and how polarized we may be, we are made of the same stuff. The building blocks of our bodies have literally evolved for connection, adaptation and resilience. Practice gives me a place to remember.

As we move through the solstice and welcome the returning light, can we be courageous enough to lay down our assumptions, listen, build bridges, make mistakes, be humbled, and rewrite the story of our time? I know that I am going to continue practicing and finding new pathways. I hope that you will join me, and us, in that polyrhythmic alliance.

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CWC Senior Fellow, Kristin Rothballer, is a transformative social change leader, with a focus on where care for the planet meets advocacy for equality and justice. She consults on strategy, programs and organizational development for nonprofits, foundations and social and land-based enterprises. Her current projects include serving as a Senior Fellow for Center for Whole Communities; helping to design FIREROCK, a musical to engage people around climate change. She is also on the teaching team of Ecology of Awakening, a program through Edge at Commonweal. Full bio here.

Muir Beach, Solstice 2017 photo by Kristin Rothballer

These are wild days indeed.

From the killings this week in Aleppo, to reports of Russians hacking the US election, to the water protectors at Standing Rock, to the Ghost Ship fire in Oakland, to the President-Elect’s unfathomable Cabinet nominees, reality has become difficult to stay fully present to. Grief and overwhelm arrive on the daily. I am generally oriented towards hope, but it’s taking deeper and deeper work to source it. I have been turning to love and prayer, not as passive or sentimental acts, but as practices that root me in true power. The reverence I have for the earth and the resiliency of life help me find hope.

The arc of justice is long, yes. And there are no shortcuts.

I have learned some of the most valuable lessons about social change in my own family. Coming out queer was excruciating for me. The reality of homophobia kept me closeted for a dozen years, pretending not to be myself with my family, while simultaneously becoming proud and politicized about my identity everywhere else. When I finally faced head-on the threats that had kept me silent for so long and came out to my parents, what I found was deep fear. They just didn’t know how to handle having a queer daughter.

The next couple of years taught me a lot about patience and forgiveness, and taking a stand for the truth while not compromising nor alienating. It was deeply painful for all of us, but ultimately it has been a journey of healing and reconciliation. Changing hearts and minds takes honesty, courage, listening, love. Those of us who dedicate our lives to justice know this.

I’ve spent over 20 years working alongside brilliant people to heal relationships between people, and between people and the Earth. It’s hard work. It’s beautiful work. We take gargantuan steps forward, and then slip backwards beyond what we thought was possible. We make mistakes and hurt each other, and we love on each other hard. We don’t back down. We get fiercer about our goals and collaborate in ways that are magnetic, inspiring. And while we know that the arc bends towards justice, we meet things along the way that confound us: greed, exploitation, genocide, racism. We remind ourselves there are no shortcuts.

What is undeniable is that there is deep pain in the heart of America.
There is deep pain in the heart of the world.
Much of this is rooted in ancestry,
calling for a deep engagement with our histories to meet and unwind it.

I am working to develop the literacy of my heart – to stay open to the grief and fear I feel, and not shut down. To open to the fear that others feel, even when it is in direct opposition to liberation, equality, peace. To hold my heart open to what is hardest, to allow it to break, and to protect it just enough so that the aching doesn’t derail me. The more our hearts break open, the more we can hold. And we are being asked to hold so much right now.

Center for Whole Communities is a refuge in these complex and wild times. It is a place to practice with rigor and reflection, to bump up against our shadows – individual and collective – and strengthen our ability to be in this work over the long arc. We support the multifaceted work of social and environmental change by creating spaces for telling our stories to each other, bridging difference, clearing our minds through awareness practice, encouraging our imaginative capacities through creativity, and engaging in meaningful dialogue with each other.

We are dedicated to “whole” communities – a mission that is calling for deep collective inquiry, as so much of the noise and news that is calling for our attention these days is rooted in the systemic fracturing of community. As our team has been exploring this Fall, there are no shortcuts to wholeness. No shortcuts to whole-heartedness.

We invite you into deeper relationship with your own heart, and with ours.

With love & solidarity,

Kristin Rothballer
Senior Fellow, Center for Whole Communities

The eyes of the future are looking back at us and they are praying for us to see beyond our own time. They are kneeling with hands clasped that we might act with restraint, that we might leave room for the life that is destined to come. To protect what is wild is to protect what is gentle. Perhaps the wilderness we fear is the pause between our own heartbeats, the silent space that says we live only by grace. Wilderness lives by this same grace. Wild mercy is in our hands.

Terry Tempest Williams

Here in Burlington, Vermont, the snow is on the ground and we are in the dormant time, resting and readying ourselves for new growth. This website represents our first new shoots of the year, a work in progress with room to grow as we work in communities across the country, supporting new and established leaders, urban, suburban and rural communities, and people from diverse backgrounds and experiences. Together we are cultivating new ways to engage around the pressing environmental and social issues of the day.

This blog will be our space for sharing updates, new ideas, and opportunities with you. We welcome your feedback and conversation!

Here’s to a rewarding and productive year ahead!

In 2010 our board and staff put into motion a three-year Breakthrough Campaign (2010-2013) during which we raised $500,000 to intentionally enhance those parts of our work that have always been strong and transform that work to break new ground.

The Breakthrough Campaign support our efforts to:

• Build new relationships with organizations in cities to model collaborative leadership and co-create new home places for whole communities work.
• Invest in staff, board, and faculty training to transform into an effective intercultural organization and challenge our alumni with what we learn in the process.
• Ensure that all the places we work are welcoming and inclusive to a diversity of people.
• Identify and cultivate new faculty to help us deepen our support of alumni, and strengthen long-term impacts of our work.
• Create entirely new formats for delivering our most sought-after programs to many more people and organizations.
• Develop a fundamentally new approach to generating revenue that allows us to sustain all of the above long into the future.